Introducing WPMU DEV 7.0 – Crispr!

As WordPress turns 15 on May 27th, this old site here, WPMU DEV, just turned 12 last month which gave us a nice opportunity to roll out a brand new design that I’m going to christen Crispr – because it’s nice and clean and, I hope, reflects our new DNA :)

Of course as it’s pretty much all brand new (kinda got too big to AB test so we thought ‘hey, let’s just go with it’) there will be quite a few edits and improvements to come (I already have about 10 lined up) but overall I’m really happy with it and reckon the team has done a great job… and I hope that you’ll like how it reflects exactly where our focus is now. On you, dear WordPress focused web developer, and you alone.

And what better time to look back at some of our previous incarnations and track the progression and aesthetics.

So, without further ado, let’s roll back the years.

Version 1 – ‘Default’

Back in 2006, my co-founder Andrew put together the first WPMUDEV.org at the root domain (one day soon we’ll fix the domain thing up, I am aware that premium.wpmudev.org doesn’t exactly look the best!) and started hosting and supporting the nascent WordPress MU community.

I modified some themes so they would work with MU and put them up there in a pack, it was really popular!

Minimalism is a virtue, right?

Not exactly going overboard yet…

Version 2 – ‘Whynot?’

I can’t remember who exactly had the first idea to have a premium version of wpmudev.org alongside a free one, there’s probably some ancient Gchat archive, but suffice to say once we had joined forces and started Incsub, we figured that it’d make sense to put some of the plugins we were developing for Edublogs (and even some of our client’s plugins, with their permission) up on a membership site… couldn’t hurt eh?

We were still really committed to the idea of having a free repository too as had been Andrew’s original vision.

The free version was blue.

The premium one was red…we got quite stuck into red.

Version 3 – ‘WPMU RED’

If I’ve ever bored you with our roots story you’ll recount that it wasn’t until the GFC that we really decided to double down on WPMU DEV.

Essentially Incsub had been making most of our money by developing large scale MU sites for various ISPs, media organisations and, well, anyone who had the cash. Post GFC it seemed nobody wanted to splash out on a big speculative blog site any more, which was pretty troubling.

But WPMU DEV was there in the background, chugging along and doing fairly well, so we figured hey, let’s double down on this… I remember doing the first lot of SaaS math on the back of an envelope, almost literally, and getting pretty excited. And the red really delivered! Thank you World :)

You gotta love that sticker.

That logo, oh dear, that logo…

Version 4 – ‘Members’

Somebody (ahem, me) had been reading too many 37Signals posts, and hey, given we were all about our members then that’s what I was gonna do… be all about our members!

By this time Andrew and I had parted company so it was a pretty terrifying experience, saddled with a lot of debt and trying to set up a ‘real’ company for the first time we actually started working on some serious designs and did our first AB testing ever! Which ended up going from loads of different members to just Julie… thanks Julie :)

We had, I think, about 6 different members and some *amazing* submissions.

I think Julie was probably the longest lasting design we had.

Version 5 – ‘Zooooooom’

This one was fast. Well, kinda the opposite of fast in that we spent aaaaages making it and then it turned out to be complete rubbish because we got so abstract that people no longer knew what we did.

Beautiful art, great design, the best site we’ve ever made… appalling business decision.

This one zoomed in and out extremely quickly.

Version 6 – ‘My Hero’

And to the rescue came, well, Devman and the crew!

This had initially lost out to the F1 allusions in general discussions but when it was clear that wasn’t working, and we had some of the art in place, well we figured we’d just smash it out and, with now some excellent animations (and epic voiceovers) the first version of our present incarnation was born.

Hello fella!

Hello to the crew!

Version 7 – ‘Crispr’

And so, to today!

And, as I mentioned, it’s all about clarity. In terms of what you get as a member, what’s coming soon, in terms of accessibility, in terms of aesthetics and in terms of what we are focused on as a business – specifically providing you with the core tools and services that you need to create, manage, update, secure, optimise, support and run an unlimited number of WP / client sites… from one place.

Oh, and with some nifty plugins thrown in too :)

Yeh, I might AB test that cheeky message ;)

Welcome to the Holy Grail.

And as an added bonus, now we’ve knocked this out we can get onto our next big (ok, not big, it’s *massive) project… namely being The Hub 2.0… which I’m even more excited about because it’s essentially the equivalent of jumping from V3 of the designs right straight through to 7. Along with the functionality. Woof.

I always love seeing historical screen shots of websites. I joined during the Members days. You should add the dates to the versions to assist readers’ nostalgia as well as contextualize yearly design trends.

Mucho Mazel on the new release. I gain so much value from wpmudev plugins and forums. I’m still kicking myself in the ass for not taking the 2014 black Friday lifetime membership deal for $100. I locked in a year or so later at a very reasonable yearly rate which becomes a better deal with each new release.

I’ve been a member for over 9 years and have rarely needed support. The documentation for every theme and plugin has been great and they just work! It was interesting to read the history and see some of the old designs.

Nice work guys. You’ve been a Godsend to my WP projects and you over deliver on service, it always blows me away what you guys are prepared to do (and are capable of…this is in brackets because, of course, you are superheroes!)

Nice to have a bit of history. I’ve been on WordPress for 10 years and with WPMU Dev for half that time – I wish I’d discovered you earlier as I flapped around trying to create BuddyPress networks!

Oh, by the way, I’ve been compiling a list of some of my favourite email subject lines (and a few in-email headings – you guys go crazy with your wordplay!). They crack me up – a highlight in my otherwise hideous tsunami of daily email, especially when I’m out and about! I was going to save it but I reckon here’s a good place that will get some attention! So here goes (I will keep adding to it):

Alien vs Editor
I spy with my ROI
Kick the bucket list
Baa Baa Trac Sheep
Don’t worry, be API
Like a spam to the slaughter
Be still my beating start-up
Never gonna give you app
For crying out cloud
I like big buttons and I cannot lie
Thumbnailed it
Guten free
Gif upper lip
The calm before the form
A fate worse than dev
Array of Hope
Spamela Anderson
Love at First Multisite
And AI will always love you
Cache me if you can
GDPR for the course

Just a small point, or two…
The login fields show the saved username (and password if you’ve saved it) but they are actually empty if you tab through them, so the submit button is grayed out! So you have to enter them manually, really annoying …
Secondly why can’t we have a login that goes straight to the hub, not have to go to yet another button/link?
Thanks and keep up the good work!

Gotcha, on it! As I mentioned above I don’t think there’s really much benefit to the floating title and share buttons, for visitors or logged in members, we’ll test that and if I’m right fix it up (along with the tabbing issue… I tab as well), thx for the heads up!

Our devs are currently looking into some reports for 2FA, so this should be sorted out soon :)
We would like to investigate the “often logged out” issue some more, could you please start a new chat or ticket about this so we can check it out?
You can do that here: https://premium.wpmudev.org/hub/support/#get-support